Sacramento has struggled with its branding for more than a century. Recently, the farm-to-fork movement has raised awareness of the local food scene, but as the region also tries to highlight its growth in business, tech, art and culture, a new brand is in the pipeline.

Public art has always had a place in the designed environment, but art in landscape is becoming more common in the public sphere. Here we feature notable spaces in the Capital Region that celebrate beauty through landscape architecture and artistic design.

Every year, Sacramento Life Center’s two mobile medical clinics provide free services for over 2,000 low-income women in critical need of medical services throughout pregnancy, with a goal to see all pregnancies come to term. However, last year, the service-providing vehicles needed some upkeep of their own: The two mobile clinics required engine repairs and tires to stay on the road.

Stephanie Stiavetti had an IT job that she liked in Sacramento, managing a company’s servers, mobile devices and computers. Yet her real passion was cooking. She had attended culinary school, designed recipes, dabbled in freelance food writing and had even written a cookbook.

Julius Anapolsky opened his haberdashery in 1922 to clothe blue collar workers before moving into the fashion industry a decade later. Now in its third generation of ownership, Julius Clothing is constantly evolving to stay competitive in the marketplace and bring high-end fashion to Sacramento.

Women dominate the creative community in Sacramento, with a slew of advertising agencies large and small with females at the helm. The women running them say this means not only more authentic messaging, but a stronger support system for the next generation.

Traditional museums and old-school performance centers — with silent hallways and auditoriums where photography is forbidden — are being rethought in favor of interactive educational spaces. The Capital Region boasts a number of vital, enriching educational institutions that intentionally link the arts and education communities to create welcoming spaces that are both inspiring and accessible.

The Sacramento Area Council of Governments reported that between 2013 and 2021, the region needs to build about 105,000 housing units to meet demand. Dividing that number by the nine years means almost 12,000 units per year.

As we get older and become more at risk for Alzheimer’s, a certain type of diet can boost our cognitive potency. Decades ago, science proved food can impact our heart health. Why should the brain be different?

It was time for Lola’s afternoon nap. Her mother, Melissa Logue, was all set to read Thomas the Tank Engine. But as she walked to her 3-year-old daughter’s bedroom, she dropped the book. Her right side felt numb and a sharp pain suddenly seized her head. She couldn’t speak.

The person who finds the cure for HIV will have their name etched in medical history. It’s a hard pill to swallow for one man who has spent 40 years chasing a cure. A cure for HIV, built upon decades of his work, could very well be proven this year. Yet Dr. Gerhard Bauer’s name may be little more than a footnote in the arcane medical journal that publishes the breakthrough.

Think of it as The Deodorant Problem. If you’re marketing a brand, it’s easy to sling the sex appeal of wine, cars or a hot new phone. But what if the product is a tad mundane and even a little stinky? How do you convey the emotional appeal of, say, unclogging a toilet? If you’re Jimmy Crabbé, you crack this problem with an inspired move that no one saw coming.

In the Sacramento Valley, where 97 percent of the state’s rice crop is grown, family farmers have been forced to fallow cropland they have worked for generations. The economic hit has been hard and true, affecting not just farmers, but seed distributors, equipment dealers and anyone else with a thumb in the rice business. The drought could cost Central Valley farmers and communities $1.7 billion this year and may lead to more than 14,500 layoffs.

Casey Marshall is hunched over his phone, furiously scrolling through his Twitter feed in search of a photo of Waste Management’s promotional robot, whose broken axle he fixed back in March. “Someone came into the Hacker Lab and needed his robot repaired,” he says, grinning, “and I was like, ‘I gotta do that.’”

Walk into any coffee shop and it’s obvious that the place we call “the office” has changed. Many of the people sitting at tables are likely mixing laptops with lattes as they browse email and write reports. Some may be pitching a sale over coffee.

In one of the crueler twists of sports, ACL tears often happen in freak accidents that you can’t really control. Seventy percent occur without contact. Even more cruelly, a woman is four times more likely than a man to tear the ligament — especially if she’s young and active.

Today’s small farmer climbs an uphill battle to find land, secure capital and overcome the hefty start-up costs. Today, farmers make up less than 1 percent of the population (compared to 15 percent in 1950), they tend to be older (the average age is 57) and about 25 percent are expected to retire in the next 20 years. “This is a new problem for human society,” writes Sharon Astyk, author of “A Nation of Farmers.”

In California’s post-redevelopment era, landowners, developers and local governments have struggled to make infill projects pencil out. Unlike new suburban developments that offer blank canvases and creative freedom, infill projects are most often shoehorned into existing neighborhoods and commercial developments where community expectations are high and cleanup costs are steep.

Robert Fay likes to tell the story of a client whose father worked with his grandmother long ago. She mentioned her plan to move her money to an investment firm. “I told her, ‘You should talk to me.’ After we had gone through all that [our bank could] do, I said, ‘Dorothy, you know I’m going to do the best I can for you.’ She said, ‘I know you will. And if you don’t, I’ll tell your mother.’”

Infill development is promoted as an antidote to suburban sprawl and environmental degradation and is championed by city planners, environmentalists and policy makers of all persuasions. But as local developers Paul Petrovich and Phil Angelides have long known, infill leads to fights over allegations of increased traffic or environmental hazards.

The scene was right out of a TV cop drama. Shots rang out. A crowd ducked for cover. The bad guys sped off in a getaway car. The incident in a Sacramento shopping mall last year was real life. But just like on television, the case was wrapped up in three hours, with the bad guys in jail and the car impounded.

Pilot and Arba see those offices and the traditional 8-hour workday as inefficient and outdated relics of the industrial age, when a set shift and common location were vital for communicating and performing work.

Like an oil derrick with arms, the school-bus-yellow robot is the center of attraction in an otherwise colorless room dominated by metal castings and concrete floors. Moving like a mime on a street corner, the robot picks up a metal casting, holds it to a computer-run camera and then places the part and the fixture that holds it on a machine for tooling.

Banks throughout the country are putting new practices in place to comply with an onset of new federal regulations prompted by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and other post-meltdown rule changes. Those expensive efforts are sparking major changes and concerns for some of the Capital Region’s smaller lenders.

Across the street from the bustling Capitol, a new establishment is making the most of the region’s history of agriculture and abundance — at the hands of three owners willing to supply the gusto and know-how.

In March, the Elk Grove city council voted to develop the last large swath of land in its jurisdiction. But this time around, instead of focusing on rooftops, as the city has for the past decade, leaders and developers hope to bolster the local economy by building new businesses.

Steve Ayers makes no bones about his vocal hope that several local contractors will be involved in the highly anticipated design and construction of a sports and entertainment facility in downtown Sacramento. And while he’s known as a humble person whose industry acumen, political clout and philanthropic activities stay largely under the radar, Ayers wants to be a prominent part of the project he believes will launch a downtown renaissance.

When Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson appeared before NBA bigwigs last April to plead his case for keeping the Kings, there was a lot more to the pitch than whether investors could afford to buy the team.

It was the last farmer’s market of the season, and the photo-op recalled The Last Supper. Standing in Cesar Chavez Plaza, Mayor Kevin Johnson spread his arms behind two tables piled high with fresh fruits and vegetables. And with scores of white-aproned restaurateurs to his right and left, he unveiled a logo promoting Sacramento as an agronomical Eden.

The first time Kimberly Foss went to a shooting range she froze her butt off.

“It was outside, it was cold and it was not a very fun experience,” says Foss, who took herself shooting for the first time to celebrate her 50th birthday. “I was brand new to shooting — it was something I’d been interested in for a long time — so I had no idea you could go to indoor ranges, much less really nice ones that cater to women as well as men.”

Justin Bartosh spun a soccer trophy around on its head like a top, thinking about his upcoming novel. Justin had never written a novel before, nor had he read one in several years. But he enjoyed imagining himself as a famous novelist.

Call them the face of the new frugal. Erica Rhyne-Christensen and fiancé Bryant Giorgi, both 27, don’t vacation much. They hardly eat out. Until recently, they rented rooms in a group house for $400 a month each instead of getting solo apartments, and they didn’t have TV.